


Lead & Rhythm

by murderofonerose (atmilliways)



Series: Dethklok Drabbles-a-Roonie-Doonie [2]
Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Drabbles, M/M, One Shot Collection, Originally Posted on Tumblr, skwistok - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-07-06 06:37:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15880569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atmilliways/pseuds/murderofonerose
Summary: A collection of short stories that center around Skwisgaar and Toki being Scandigayvians.





	1. Good Jobs, Skwigelf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "Skwisgaar, humiliation" [from this list](http://atmilliways.tumblr.com/post/173966632187/metalocalypse-prompts%22).

He found out later what had actually happened, about the front Toki had put up to save face during the whole Caroline thing. Nathan told him, after, but by then it was, well. _After_. 

Before that Skwisgaar had been so sure of the whole LadyMates thing was complete dildos and it would only take Toki one date to figure that out. Who wanted to commit to just one person when there are so many willing groupies at every concert and, for that matter, anywhere else they went? 

So he was shocked when he heard Pickles slur something vague about a second date and a hotel room. The shock of it gradually turned into a simmering anger that it never occurred to him he didn’t understand. Stupid Toki and his stupid ideas about stupid monogamy, when it was clear from experience that any woman would spread her legs for any famous person she could get in the bed and until hitting the GMLF stage would also try to get her claws in for child support. Plus, a lot of women could get pretty crazy about getting married before they turned thirty. No self-respecting man would give a shit about getting married by a certain age — which only proved, in Skwisgaar’s mind, that to think that way was to be fucking insane, like a lady. 

Why did Toki want to be insane like a lady? 

Then, because he was fucking pissed off, Skwisgaar decided that if Toki wanted to be like a lady, he could get fucked like one too... He been hanging out with Pickles again so the booze and weed might’ve had a vote in that decision. 

It was well after midnight before Toki returned to Mordhaus. Skwisgaar had left strict instructions with the servants to let him know when that happened, no matter what he was doing, and once he was paying enough attention to realize why the conveyer belt-like line of horny women had been interrupted, he wasn’t even mad. Not at the messenger, anyway, who had been thoughtful enough to bring a warm washcloth for him to clean up with before yanking his jeans up from around his ankles and stomping off to Toki’s room. 

The wait was a long one. Skwisgaar had plenty of time to contemplate the best way to confront his bandmate, and eventually settled on hiding in the closet and leaping out with a yell of Ah-has! when that two-timing— No, wait, what? When that stupid, not-practicing-guitar idiot came in. He folded himself in there, pulling down a fair amount of clothes to make an appropriately padded seat. 

He was asleep before his ass even had time to go numb. It had been a long week of slut-banging and pantie-collecting to win that bet he’d made with Murderface. 

The sound of a door slamming woke Skwisgaar up with a start. For a moment he had no idea why he was in a dark, enclosed space that smelled like model airplane glue and feet, but an impressive string of curses in a jumble of Norwegian and English that cut through the lingering confusion. Toki. Groggy enough to still be pissed, even though the details of why were slow to follow, Skwisgaar yanked the closet door aside and launched himself out into the room. 

“AH-HAS!”

He was vindictively gratified to see Toki jump about a foot in the air before the other man’s flailing punch caught him square in the nose and sent him reeling right back in where he’d come from. 

“Whats the fuckings hells you ams doing in theres?” Toki screeched somewhere beyond the painful fireworks going off behind the Swede’s eyelids. 

“Uhhhhh?” Skwisgaar tried. He touched his nose gingerly — yep, absolutely broken. Then he touched the back of his head, which he’d cracked against the back of the closet wall — not bloody, but he was probably in for one hell of a goose egg soon. Blinking to clear his tearing vision, he finally noticed that one of Toki’s arms was in a sling, he had bruises all over, and his eyes had that unfocused look of a man on pain medication. “Whads, uh... Whads happed to yous?”

“I jumps out a hotel windows to escapes a crazy bitch! That’s am whats... It was supers traumatic, I’m going to need some serious sick days from this shits what am to recovers.” Toki started down at the lanky blond sprawled on his closet floor for a moment, then offered him a hand up with his good arm. 

“Yous... Didn’d you had a big lady dates to goes to?” Skwisgaar asked, staring stupidly at the offered hand. 

Toki looked at him like he might be intentionally stupid, then grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him to his feet that way. “That was the dates, dumb dildo. Dids I gives you the cons-cushion or somesthing?”

“Uhhhhh... probablies,” Skwisgaar muttered. He felt slow, sluggish, and very, very foolish. Not only had the surprise confrontation gone spectacularly poorly, he had completely lost track of why he’d felt it so necessary in the first place. Plus, now he needed to go to the Mordland hospital. Greats job, Skwigelf. 

“Fucks.” Toki sighed and sat down on his bed to pull his boots back on, the most of his outfit he’d had time to remove before Skwisgaar's surprise appearance. “Okays, hospital times for Misters Hurts-Himselfs. Don’t worries, I thinks Murderface am stills in there for a brokens dick, so you won’ts be alones tonight. I guess you wins that bet.”

“As if dere was addy doubts,” Skwisgaar mumbled, prodding at his rapidly swelling nose again. The comment got him a bit of a smirk, and an offered pain pill that he automatically took and dry-swallowed. He also accepted Toki’s support as they made their way out into the hall. “Ad least I cad still plays. What’s you break, collarsbone?”

“Nopes, it was a really good landings actually, I just sprains the arms. Should heal pretty quicks.” Toki snickered a little. “Will be’s a lots longer til Murderface plays bass with hims dick agains. Thinks he’ll gets any worse ats it afters this?”

“How coulds he?” Skwisgaar shot back, and felt almost good about all the crazy turns this night had taken. And sure, he knew Toki well enough to know that the other guitarist would give him shit about the whole thing for a while, which was embarrassing, but also kind of okay. 

At least Toki’s date was a bust and he would be the center of attention again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was "Throwing their arms around the other person, holding them close while they kiss AND/OR being unable to open their eyes for a few moments afterward." [from this list](http://atmilliways.tumblr.com/post/173585590267/fictional-kiss-prompts).

There was a whole year of his life that Skwisgaar never, ever talked about.

Not that the rest of his childhood was a fucking fairytale, but that was different. Skipping home from school, all excited to show his mom that he had gotten such a great grade on a recent test and his teacher had written in her notes at the end about how he was pretty much top of the class, only to walk in on Servetta being fucked by two dudes at once was one thing. And sure, running out the front door into the snow, getting chased by wolves until he fell into a huge sunken cavern with a dead, desiccated corpse, a huge fuckoff suit of Viking armor or whatever that no normal human would’ve been big enough to fit into, and a free guitar had been an experience in a half, but the search and rescue shit and the big public uproar afterwards really put a damper on that.

For a month after all that, Skwisgaar stayed in his room and played his new guitar, slowly teaching himself to play every song he could think of. The only times he came out were to use the bathroom and to grab more food from the kitchen. Servetta left him alone, didn’t make him go to school or anything, barely spoke to him, in fact, because she was too busy entertaining random guests. The weird thing about some of those guests, though, was that they carried clipboards and were dressed business casual and didn’t have sex with her. Mostly.

Then some of those business casuals took Skwisgaar aside and told him that he was being removed from Servetta’s care for a little while, and could he pack up a suitcase of all his most important things please?

They told him that he was going to stay with a small, wholesome family in Norway, outside a quiet village where there wouldn’t be any reporters camping out on the lawn to interview him about his miraculous survival story. He would even have a little brother there, wouldn’t that be nice.

Skwisgaar hadn’t bothered telling them that it would probably be dildos because he didn’t speak Norwegian and therefore likely wouldn’t be able to communicate very well with his new “family” — he just figure that, hell, at least they’d be easier to understand than the Dutch. Later, when he was taken to his new home by a series of cars and then, ultimately, a fucking snowmobile, he wished he had said something.

The house itself actually was like something out of a fairytale, like a gingerbread cottage laden with a perpetual icing of snow. His so-called new mom looked like the witch that lived in it and cooked little children up for supper. His new dad didn’t even put in an appearance at his arrival; Reverend Aslaug was in his study, working on his sermon for the coming Sunday. The promised little brother was nowhere to be seen either, and the room they were to share was so bare and lacking in personality that it was probably a toss up as to whether or not he had already been shoved in the oven for dinner. Skwisgaar also learned fairly quickly that the language barrier wouldn’t be much of a problem, because the people in this house barely talked.

To his mixed relief and distaste, dinner on that first night was all very obviously vegetarian. Skwisgaar choked it down sitting on a stool next to a brown-haired boy only a few years younger than himself who seemed too timid to make eye contact. There was only water to drink, which was also a disappointment. At least in Servetta’s house he had been able to sneak some wine or vodka every now and then. Also, in Servetta’s house, the temperature had always been scrupulously kept to a point warm enough to wander around naked without catching a chill. The air in this house was sharp and as bare as the rooms, and carried with it a cold that cut to the bone. It wasn’t as bad as, say, going out and sitting in the snow, but it wasn’t comfortable.

Also, there was no dessert. It was probably childish to be pissed off about that, but he was.

As soon as he’d been dismissed from the table, Skwisgaar went straight to his room and pulled the long duffel bag out from under his bed. The guitar had come to him without a case, so he’d had to make due with wrapping it in clothes so it didn’t bounce around in there and had sufficient padding to weather any rough handling. He hoped. Reverence and fear alike had him holding his breath until he’d gotten it out and could both see and feel the instrument was still intact.

There was a quiet gasp from the door, which Skwisgaar had left open in his hurry. The little brown-haired boy had followed him — which made sense, they did share the room, after all — and looked shocked at the sight of the guitar. As suddenly as he had made the sound he clapped a hand over his mouth and quickly shut the door behind himself, whispering something urgently in Norwegian that Skwisgaar, startled by the reaction and its speed, couldn’t quite catch.

“ _What_?” he asked blankly in Swedish.

The little boy’s face screwed up in concentration, and then tried again in poor but understandable English. “Don’ts whats lets them catch yous with that. Father and Mother, they… don’ts like toys.”

Skwisgaar snorted in derision, but he had gotten okay grades in English at school. “Ams not a toy,” he replied fiercely.

The boy shook his head, tears coming to his eyes in frustration at not being fully understood. “Don’t matters! They sees that, they’ll takes it and makes it what goes in the firesplace to be burned for heats!”

The very suggestion made Skwisgaar physically recoil, clutching the guitar to his chest. “Nos!”

Seeing that this had finally gotten through, the boy gave him a small, shy, gap-toothed smile. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly, “I won’t tells. Toki ams good at keeping secrets.”

And he was. He showed Skwisgaar a spot on the floor where the boards could be pried up and the guitar could be safely hidden during the day. When the older boy brought it out to play at night, he both listened in hushed awe and sat at the door to keep an ear out for approaching footsteps, just in case. Skwisgaar was grateful for that, because without his precious guitar to look forward to in the he didn’t know if he could have handled the dead-silence homeschooling with Anja or the brutal, seemingly endless succession of chores.

Servetta had never given him chores, so his first instinct was to skip out. That earned him a harsh talking to, as did protesting that it made more sense to  _shovel_  snow than it did to  _sweep_  it. Plus, to his horror, he had to watch poor little Toki take two lashes for falling and knocking down some of the symmetrical stacks of firewood out behind the house. But Toki took it stoically and didn’t complain later that night when they were alone, just quietly kept lookout at the bedroom door as usual, which Skwisgaar figured earned the kid some kind of respect in his book. He didn’t think it was necessarily healthy, but he was in no position to know for sure. 

It had only been a few months when, like an idiot, Skwisgaar made any sort of protest. Loathe as he was to admit it later, he probably wouldn’t have done it if Toki hadn’t tried to cover for him and take the punishment in his place. He was the one who’d been carrying most of the groceries back from the village, and he was he one who hadn’t been looking out and slipped on a patch of ice. He was the one who’d walked back into the house carrying the roughly woven grocery bag with smashed egg innards leaking  _drip drip drip_  out the bottom. But then Toki piped up and said he’d dropped it, and without questioning that Aslaug told Anja to take the boy outside while he got the strap. Skwisgaar followed the reverend through the house and all the way outside, protesting, shoving his hair angrily out of his eyes because he was overdue for a haircut (certainly not for the first time in his life), and went so far as to grab at the man’s wrist as he raised it for the first blow. 

They didn’t dare strike Skwisgaar, since technically he was a ward of the Swedish government and would be checked on every now and then. Instead, they just put both boys in the Punishment Hole for the night and dragged the heavy butter churn over the door to hold it shut. Skwisgaar spent a while pounding on it from the inside, but he wasn’t strong enough to lift that much weight by himself and Toki couldn’t fit beside him on the ladder to help.

So he sat with Toki on the dirt floor, idly twirling the straw they’d tossed down earlier that day to help absorb the damp. The Punishment Hole doubled as a cellar, but unfortunately was only stocked with unappetizing shit like canned beets, pickled cabbage, and chicken feed. The beets in particular creeped him out, because floating there in their fluids they looked like disembodied eyeballs.

“Soooo…” He glanced sidelong at Toki, whose round, pale face was just visible in faint outline from the light peeking through the door. “Whats now?”

Toki shrugged. “Now we waits unstil they lets us out,” he said in a tiny voice.

“Oh. Um… how longs will that be’s?”

“Overnights, maybe.” The younger boy scrunched his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them tight. “You shouldn’t has dones that. I woulds have been fines, Toki can takes it.”

“So’s?” Skwisgaar asked sharply. “I can lives just fine without my Moms paying no attentions untos me, that don’t means I can stays with hers, says the governskent. Just ‘cause I falls down a hole ones time, everyone freaks out, says she ams unskapables,  _pft_. Tells me somesthing whats I alreadies don’t know! This ams just as bads, Toki, maybes worse.” 

What followed was a ringing silence. After a moment, though, Toki inches closer to him with a little sigh.

“Whats was yous am Mom likes?” he asked softly, in the same wistful tone he sometimes used to request Skwisgaar play a particular song. “Whats she looks like?”

Skwisgaar huffed, but hell, it was better than just sitting there silently in the cold. His fingers, desperately missing the feel of guitar strings, started twisting bits of straw together aimlessly. “She ams… pretties. More pretties than the other moms, I guess so’s.”

He paused to see if this was sufficient, but Toki just waited patiently for more. He coughed.

“Uh. Blondes hairs, like mines. Sames eyes. But, you knows, lots of makeups what paints her face and skirts cut up to way too fars high like a proskitute.”

“Whats am that?” Toki asked innocently.

Skwisgaar turned and blinked at him in the near dark. “You don’ts know?”

The kid shook his head.

“Well, it ams like… You knows abouts the birds and the bees?”

Toki just stared back at him blankly.

“Wells, uhhhhhh…”

It occurred to Skwisgaar that although he’d seen orgies by the time he was seven, it was entirely likely that Toki had never even seen so much as his parents bare ankles. There was something deeply uncomfortable in that realization, but he honestly couldn’t tell which was objectively worse. He didn’t really want to explain sex, because it had sounded much stupider and gross when the teacher explained it in school. It wasn’t about procreation ( _ugh_ ) and it wasn’t about love ( _gag_ ), it was about desperation and ignoring shit like being out of groceries and overdue bills and  _your own damn child._

“Uhhh… It ams a lady what likes to kisses and hugs too much,” he said finally, and immediately felt like a lying asshole.

But even so, he was firm in his lying assholeness. He had seen Toki’s scars; the boy was completely unselfconscious about them and, while he didn’t show them off, never made any attempt to hide them. It was like he didn’t remember they were there, or didn’t realize what a big fucking, fucked up deal they were.  
Skwisgaar, on the other hand, knew he had scars. The invisible kind, from pangs of hunger and loneliness and disgust directed at someone he was supposed to love. He didn’t want to put them on display.

“Wowee,” Toki said softly, still turning the new word and supposed meaning over in his head. Then he added casually, like it was nothing, “I never gets no hugs or kisses, so I guess no ones ever beens a proskitute ats me. Well, maybe when I’s a baby, but I don’t remembers.”

That was depressing. Skwisgaar didn’t want it to be, or didn’t want to care, or something, because that would be a hell of a lot easier to swallow, but it was.

“You, uh, wants one nows?” he asked awkwardly, hating himself for every syllable because, shit, of course that was what Servetta’s boy would offer.

But even in the dark he could see Toki’s face light up as though it was his fucking birthday, and all Skwisgaar had offered was a hug. Or was that a kiss? He hadn’t put that much thought into it.

“Okays, alrights, let me show you how to does it,” he said quickly, rushing to get this over with now.

It might as well be both. After all, he felt really bad for the poor kid, and he himself was just as starved for attention in his own way. Skwisgaar squared his shoulders in concentration and turned to Toki, trying his best to remember everything he’d seen his mom involved in before it got all asses and elbows.

So he reached out out and brushed brown hair back from Toki’s face, tucking it behind one ear. He cupped the other boy’s cheek and drew him closer, out of that knees-to-chest fetal position, until suddenly they were both crouched on their knees facing each other. Let’s see, so far so good… Toki was watching him with wide, entranced eyes. Skwisgaar smirked a little at that, and wrapped one arm around his waist in a loss hug.

“This ams kissing,” he whispered, and kissed him.

Toki  _melted_  into it, throwing his arms around Skwisgaar and clinging to him like his life depended on it. And it wasn’t even the gross, open mouthed kind of kiss that adults (or at least the kind Servetta brought home) all seemed to like so much. When Skwisgaar finally broke the kiss he saw that Toki had closed his eyes, which until that moment he had only ever seen in happen in cheesy romance movies. 

“Wowsa, I guess I ams goods,” Skwisgaar chuckled.

Toki grinned at him, kissed him on the cheek, and detached. “Really goods. Thanks, Skwisgaar, you’s a really goods pal.“

Without the smaller boy’s weight against him, Skwisgaar felt unexpectedly exposed. He tugged him back closer, so they were sitting with their upper bodies slightly overlapped against the wall. For warmth, he told himself.  _Not_  because of scars. 

A few weeks later, some people with clipboards showed up again to tell Skwisgaar that his mother had petitioned to get custody of him back and been approved. He barely had time to say goodbye to Toki before he left, and felt like an absolute bastard for promising he’d write when he didn’t even know the address, or if Aslaug and Anja would pass it on if he did. But it wasn’t like it was his first lie, and it made the kid smile.

When he got home, nothing much had changed. His mom remembered to bring food home and shut her bedroom door more often, but that was about it. She didn’t care that he zoned out during his classes now because the Wartooths’ weird home curriculum had put him behind in just about every subject and he quickly dropped to the bottom of his class.

Skwisgaar spent the rest of the year pissed off and sometimes, at night, unaccountably sad that no one was there to hear him play before he drifted off to sleep. At least, that was until he perfected the art of stealing money from Servetta’s purse so he could afford proper guitar lessons, learned how to write his own increasingly complicated riffs, and very intentionally forgot everything that had ever made him feel dependent on any other human being.

Or if he remembered, he certainly never, ever talked about it.  


	3. You Were my September Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was, "Throwing their arms around the other person, holding them close while they kiss AND/OR being unable to open their eyes for a few moments afterward." I decided to take it in a Kidklok direction.

There was a whole year of his life that Skwisgaar never, ever talked about.

Not that the rest of his childhood was a fucking fairytale, but that was different. Skipping home from school, all excited to show his mom that he had gotten such a great grade on a recent test and his teacher had written in her notes at the end about how he was pretty much top of the class, only to walk in on Servetta being fucked by two dudes at once was one thing. And sure, running out the front door into the snow, getting chased by wolves until he fell into a huge sunken cavern with a dead, desiccated corpse, a huge fuckoff suit of Viking armor or whatever that no normal human would’ve been big enough to fit into, and a free guitar had been an experience in a half, but the search and rescue shit and the big public uproar afterwards really put a damper on that.

For a month after all that, Skwisgaar stayed in his room and played his new guitar, slowly teaching himself to play every song he could think of. The only times he came out were to use the bathroom and to grab more food from the kitchen. Servetta left him alone, didn’t make him go to school or anything, barely spoke to him, in fact, because she was too busy entertaining random guests. The weird thing about some of those guests, though, was that they carried clipboards and were dressed business casual and didn’t have sex with her. Mostly.

Then some of those business casuals took Skwisgaar aside and told him that he was being removed from Servetta’s care for a little while, and could he pack up a suitcase of all his most important things please?

They told him that he was going to stay with a small, wholesome family in Norway, outside a quiet village where there wouldn’t be any reporters camping out on the lawn to interview him about his miraculous survival story. He would even have a little brother there, wouldn’t that be nice.

Skwisgaar hadn’t bothered telling them that it would probably be dildos because he didn’t speak Norwegian and therefore likely wouldn’t be able to communicate very well with his new “family” — he just figure that, hell, at least they’d be easier to understand than the Dutch. Later, when he was taken to his new home by a series of cars and then, ultimately, a fucking snowmobile, he wished he had said something.

The house itself actually was like something out of a fairytale, like a gingerbread cottage laden with a perpetual icing of snow. His so-called new mom looked like the witch that lived in it and cooked little children up for supper. His new dad didn’t even put in an appearance at his arrival; Reverend Aslaug was in his study, working on his sermon for the coming Sunday. The promised little brother was nowhere to be seen either, and the room they were to share was so bare and lacking in personality that it was probably a toss up as to whether or not he had already been shoved in the oven for dinner. Skwisgaar also learned fairly quickly that the language barrier wouldn’t be much of a problem, because the people in this house barely talked.

To his mixed relief and distaste, dinner on that first night was all very obviously vegetarian. Skwisgaar choked it down sitting on a stool next to a brown-haired boy only a few years younger than himself who seemed too timid to make eye contact. There was only water to drink, which was also a disappointment. At least in Servetta’s house he had been able to sneak some wine or vodka every now and then. Also, in Servetta’s house, the temperature had always been scrupulously kept to a point warm enough to wander around naked without catching a chill. The air in this house was sharp and as bare as the rooms, and carried with it a cold that cut to the bone. It wasn’t as bad as, say, going out and sitting in the snow, but it wasn’t comfortable.

Also, there was no dessert. It was probably childish to be pissed off about that, but he was.

As soon as he’d been dismissed from the table, Skwisgaar went straight to his room and pulled the long duffel bag out from under his bed. The guitar had come to him without a case, so he’d had to make due with wrapping it in clothes so it didn’t bounce around in there and had sufficient padding to weather any rough handling. He hoped. Reverence and fear alike had him holding his breath until he’d gotten it out and could both see and feel the instrument was still intact.

There was a quiet gasp from the door, which Skwisgaar had left open in his hurry. The little brown-haired boy had followed him — which made sense, they did share the room, after all — and looked shocked at the sight of the guitar. As suddenly as he had made the sound he clapped a hand over his mouth and quickly shut the door behind himself, whispering something urgently in Norwegian that Skwisgaar, startled by the reaction and its speed, couldn’t quite catch.

“What?” he asked blankly in Swedish.

The little boy’s face screwed up in concentration, and then tried again in poor but understandable English. “Don’ts whats lets them catch yous with that. Father and Mother, they... don’ts like toys.”

Skwisgaar snorted in derision, but he had gotten okay grades in English at school. “Ams not a toy,” he replied fiercely.

The boy shook his head, tears coming to his eyes in frustration at not being fully understood. “Don’t matters! They sees that, they’ll takes it and makes it what goes in the firesplace to be burned for heats!”

The very suggestion made Skwisgaar physically recoil, clutching the guitar to his chest. “Nos!”

Seeing that this had finally gotten through, the boy gave him a small, shy, gap-toothed smile. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly, “I won’t tells. Toki ams good at keeping secrets.”

And he was. He showed Skwisgaar a spot on the floor where the boards could be pried up and the guitar could be safely hidden during the day. When the older boy brought it out to play at night, he both listened in hushed awe and sat at the door to keep an ear out for approaching footsteps, just in case. Skwisgaar was grateful for that, because without his precious guitar to look forward to in the he didn’t know if he could have handled the dead-silence homeschooling with Anja or the brutal, seemingly endless succession of chores.

Servetta had never given him chores, so his first instinct was to skip out. That earned him a harsh talking to, as did protesting that it made more sense to _shovel_ snow than it did to _sweep_ it. Plus, to his horror, he had to watch poor little Toki take two lashes for falling and knocking down some of the symmetrical stacks of firewood out behind the house. But Toki took it stoically and didn’t complain later that night when they were alone, just quietly kept lookout at the bedroom door as usual, which Skwisgaar figured earned the kid some kind of respect in his book. He didn’t think it was necessarily healthy, but he was in no position to know for sure.

It had only been a few months when, like an idiot, Skwisgaar made any sort of protest. Loathe as he was to admit it later, he probably wouldn’t have done it if Toki hadn’t tried to cover for him and take the punishment in his place. He was the one who’d been carrying most of the groceries back from the village, and he was he one who hadn’t been looking out and slipped on a patch of ice. He was the one who’d walked back into the house carrying the roughly woven grocery bag with smashed egg innards leaking _drip drip drip_ out the bottom. But then Toki piped up and said he’d dropped it, and without questioning thatAslaugtold Anja to take the boy outside while he got the strap. Skwisgaar followed the reverend through the house and all the way outside, protesting, shoving his hair angrily out of his eyes because he was overdue for a haircut (certainly not for the first time in his life), and went so far as to grab at the man’s wrist as he raised it for the first blow.

They didn’t dare strike Skwisgaar, since technically he was a ward of the Swedish government and would be checked on every now and then. Instead, they just put both boys in the Punishment Hole for the night and dragged the heavy butter churn over the door to hold it shut. Skwisgaar spent a while pounding on it from the inside, but he wasn’t strong enough to lift that much weight by himself and Toki couldn’t fit beside him on the ladder to help.

So he sat with Toki on the dirt floor, idly twirling the straw they’d tossed down earlier that day to help absorb the damp. The Punishment Hole doubled as a cellar, but unfortunately was only stocked with unappetizing shit like canned beets, pickled cabbage, and chicken feed. The beets in particular creeped him out, because floating there in their fluids they looked like disembodied eyeballs.

“Soooo...” He glanced sidelong at Toki, whose round, pale face was just visible in faint outline from the light peeking through the door. “Whats now?”

Toki shrugged. “Now we waits unstil they lets us out,” he said in a tiny voice.

“Oh. Um... how longs will that be’s?”

“Overnights, maybe.” The younger boy scrunched his legs up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them tight. “You shouldn’t has dones that. I woulds have been fines, Toki can takes it.”

“So’s?” Skwisgaar asked sharply. “I can lives just fine without my Moms paying no attentions untos me, that don’t means I can stays with hers, says the governskent. Just ‘cause I falls down a hole ones time, everyone freaks out, says she ams unskapables,pft. Tells me somesthing whats I alreadies don’t know! This ams just as bads, Toki, maybes worse.”

What followed was a ringing silence. After a moment, though, Toki inches closer to him with a little sigh.

“Whats was yous am Mom likes?” he asked softly, in the same wistful tone he sometimes used to request Skwisgaar play a particular song. “Whats she looks like?”

Skwisgaar huffed, but hell, it was better than just sitting there silently in the cold. His fingers, desperately missing the feel of guitar strings, started twisting bits of straw together aimlessly. “She ams... pretties. More pretties than the other moms, I guess so’s.”

He paused to see if this was sufficient, but Toki just waited patiently for more. He coughed.

“Uh. Blondes hairs, like mines. Sames eyes. But, you knows, lots of makeups what paints her face and skirts cut up to way too fars high like a proskitute.”

“Whats am that?” Toki asked innocently.

Skwisgaar turned and blinked at him in the near dark. “You don’ts know?”

The kid shook his head.

“Well, it ams like... You knows abouts the birds and the bees?”

Toki just stared back at him blankly.

“Wells, uhhhhhh...”

It occurred to Skwisgaar that although he’d seen orgies by the time he was seven, it was entirely likely that Toki had never even seen so much as his parents bare ankles. There was something deeply uncomfortable in that realization, but he honestly couldn’t tell which was objectively worse. He didn’t really want to explain sex, because it had sounded much stupider and gross when the teacher explained it in school. It wasn’t about procreation (ugh) and it wasn’t about love (gag), it was about desperation and ignoring shit like being out of groceries and overdue bills and _your own damn child._

“Uhhh... It ams a lady what likes to kisses and hugs too much,” he said finally, and immediately felt like a lying asshole.

But even so, he was firm in his lying assholeness. He had seen Toki’s scars; the boy was completely unselfconscious about them and, while he didn’t show them off, never made any attempt to hide them. It was like he didn’t remember they were there, or didn’t realize what a big fucking, fucked up deal they were.

Skwisgaar, on the other hand, knew he had scars. The invisible kind, from pangs of hunger and loneliness and disgust directed at someone he was supposed to love. He didn’t want to put them on display.

“Wowee,” Toki said softly, still turning the new word and supposed meaning over in his head. Then he added casually, like it was nothing, “I never gets no hugs or kisses, so I guess no ones ever beens a proskitute ats me. Well, maybe when I’s a baby, but I don’t remembers.”

That was depressing. Skwisgaar didn’t want it to be, or didn’t want to care, or something, because that would be a hell of a lot easier to swallow, but it was.

“You, uh, wants one nows?” he asked awkwardly, hating himself for every syllable because, shit, of course that was what Servetta’s boy would offer.

But even in the dark he could see Toki's face light up as though it was his fucking birthday, and all Skwisgaar had offered was a hug. Or was that a kiss? He hadn’t put that much thought into it.

“Okays, alrights, let me show you how to does it,” he said quickly, rushing to get this over with now.

It might as well be both. After all, he felt really bad for the poor kid, and he himself was just as starved for attention in his own way. Skwisgaar squared his shoulders in concentration and turned to Toki, trying his best to remember everything he’d seen his mom involved in before it got all asses and elbows.

So he reached out out and brushed brown hair back from Toki’s face, tucking it behind one ear. He cupped the other boy’s cheek and drew him closer, out of that knees-to-chest fetal position, until suddenly they were both crouched on their knees facing each other. Let’s see, so far so good... Toki was watching him with wide, entranced eyes. Skwisgaar smirked a little at that, and wrapped one arm around his waist in a loss hug.

“This ams kissing,” he whispered, and kissed him.

Toki _melted_ into it, throwing his arms around Skwisgaar and clinging to him like his life depended on it. And it wasn’t even the gross, open mouthed kind of kiss that adults (or at least the kind Servetta brought home) all seemed to like so much. When Skwisgaar finally broke the kiss he saw that Toki had closed his eyes, which until that moment he had only ever seen in happen in cheesy romance movies.

“Wowsa, I guess I ams goods,” Skwisgaar chuckled.

Toki grinned at him, kissed him on the cheek, and detached. “Really goods. Thanks, Skwisgaar, you’s a really goods pal."

Without the smaller boy’s weight against him, Skwisgaar felt unexpectedly exposed. He tugged him back closer, so they were sitting with their upper bodies slightly overlapped against the wall. For warmth, he told himself.Notbecause of scars.

A few weeks later, some people with clipboards showed up again to tell Skwisgaar that his mother had petitioned to get custody of him back and been approved. He barely had time to say goodbye to Toki before he left, and felt like an absolute bastard for promising he’d write when he didn’t even know the address, or if Aslaug and Anja would pass it on if he did. But it wasn’t like it was his first lie, and it made the kid smile.

When he got home, nothing much had changed. His mom remembered to bring food home and shut her bedroom door more often, but that was about it. She didn’t care that he zoned out during his classes now because the Wartooths’ weird home curriculum had put him behind in just about every subject and he quickly dropped to the bottom of his class.

Skwisgaar spent the rest of the year pissed off and sometimes, at night, unaccountably sad that no one was there to hear him play before he drifted off to sleep. At least, that was until he perfected the art of stealing money from Servetta’s purse so he could afford proper guitar lessons, learned how to write his own increasingly complicated riffs, and very intentionally forgot everything that had ever made him feel dependent on any other human being.

Or if he remembered, he certainly never, ever talked about it.  


	4. Sleepy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because [Calliopinot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calliopinot) posted something on tumblr. I saw "election" and "sleepy Skwistok" and, because I was bored and hot and... at work? ... I wrote a thing. It honestly reflects the current heat wave and how I feel about being spammed with the same frickin election commercials over and over and over and _over_.

Skwisgaar and Toki lay curled together on the hotel bed, windows open but air conditioning blasting to counteract the heat of the afternoon. It was November and they’d packed (or more accurately, had their servants pack for them) clothes for autumn weather, but Northern California had tricked them. Instead of fog and gentle rain and a light chill that was nothing compared to what they’d grown up with in Scandinavia, it was hot. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit hot. _Summer_  hot, despite the rolling vineyard view of autumn-colored leaves and bare vines peeking through. 

They’d come for a wine tasting vacation, and kind of an anniversary celebration except they didn’t go in for that sort of thing — they were brutal guitar gods, not ladies. But it was too hot to want to do much of anything, so instead they lounged in bed, wearing bathing suits that the hotel’s outdoor pool wasn’t shady enough to spend an afternoon by without Skwisgaar burning horribly, aimlessly watching tv. When they were hungry, they ordered room service. Whenever one of those annoying election commercials came on, Toki threw popcorn at the wide screen and cheered whenever he hit someone in the eye or mouth, because what did they care about the American political process. 

It should have been boring and stupid, but it was okay. Kind of nice, even. A nice, quiet, lazy weekend. 


End file.
